The college students are back in town, and Lawrence Police say that after months of complaints about lax enforcement, they’re going to get tough on noisy house parties.

Police on Wednesday unveiled new internal rules they say will help them enforce the city’s noise ordinance, something they admit they haven’t been doing well in recent years.

The changes will cut down on paperwork for officers and make it easier for neighbors to call in complaints without having to give a formal statement to police.

“We’re trying to provide a better living for all citizens,” said Sgt. Dan Ward, a Lawrence Police spokesman.

The changes are partly a response to a Kansas University freshman’s fall Oct. 24 from the roof of 1045 Tenn., a campus-area home with a reputation as a “party house.”

After Sara Anne Driessel’s fall, police say, it became clear that neighbors in the area had been calling in noise complaints about the house for weeks. One problem, Ward said, was that residents didn’t know officers usually wouldn’t give a noise citation unless a neighbor was willing to be a witness and give a statement.

They’d call and report the problem. A dispatcher would ask whether they were willing to speak with an officer. If they didn’t want to talk to the officer, nothing would happen.

“We had to have somebody who was willing to talk to us. We had to get their information, and we had to fill out a report,” Ward said.

New game plan

Lawrence Police are revamping their rules on responding to noisy parties, making it easier to respond to complaints and simplifying the process for bringing violators to court.

Now, the department’s rules clearly spell out that officers can cite someone for a noise complaint without a statement from an upset neighbor. Another change is that officers won’t have to write a full report afterward and instead can issue a simple notice to appear in municipal court.

The changes have been in the works for several months and come partly at the advice of consultants who were studying how the department used its resources. One thing they found was that more than half the department’s calls were related to alcohol and noise. On busy weekends, they have as many as 70 noise complaints, and processing one written report can take hours.

“When you’re trying to add 70 new cases per weekend, that’s devastating to our manpower allocation,” Ward said.

Another change, Ward said, is that the computerized dispatching system will be giving police more information about previous noise calls at an address. In the past, officers had no way of knowing whether a home had previous disturbance calls, he said.

Ward said the new policy was not related to a Dec. 21 shooting at Boardwalk Apartments, 524 Frontier Road, that followed a noise dispute. The new policy already had been written at the time of that incident, Ward said.

Centennial concerns

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Many of the complaints about noise enforcement have come from the Centennial Neighborhood, where citizens complained the city’s “nuisance house” ordinance, which requires landlords to fix problems if a home has two or more citations per year, was useless.

“The system wasn’t working,” said Jerry Schultz, part of the Centennial Neighborhood Assn.’s steering committee.

Schultz estimated he called police twice a year, on average, to report noise disturbances, and had seen firsthand the confusion that happened. He said the changes sounded encouraging.

“I want to commend them for making some effort here,” he said. “It takes a long time for that sort of thing to happen within those kinds of organizations. We’ve been waiting and kind of losing hope, so I’m very pleased.”

Mixed response

At their home near 10th and Tennessee streets, Carissa Hill and Heather La Bash said they didn’t have a strong opinion about the changes. Hill, 28, who owns the home, said she liked the idea that the changes might stop pitting neighbors against neighbors, but she questioned whether officers might be more likely to cite a group of young people.

La Bash, a KU graduate student who rents from Hill, said she didn’t oppose the new rules, as long as offenders were still given fair warning. La Bash said she recently had 150 people in the home for an all-night birthday bash — with no noise complaints.